“Our chef donned a pair of thick rubber gloves, reached under his cart and pulled out a metal bucket. Reaching into the bucket, he removed a honeycomb, pulsing with live bees.”

Have you noticed how strange food has suddenly become hip? It’s everywhere now. Travel and food channels on cable television and a plethora of books and blogs all provide vicarious thrills for the stout of stomach or faint of heart. You can watch Anthony Bourdain eating the still-beating heart of a cobra on TV while Jerry Hopkins, who used to write about Elvis and Jim Morrison, now has two books out about strange foods.

This is old news to westerners who live in Asia who, at various points in their travels, are destined to be faced with their worst fears served up on a plate and told that it would be a tremendous insult to the host if they don’t take a taste of the monkey snot soup.

The thing is, westerners seem to be more squeamish about food than Asians and things our local friends take for granted are sources of nightmares for us. That could be because in places like America, people selling food go to great lengths to make you forget that what you’re eating came from a living organism. Chinese famously eat everything with legs except the table, everything that flies except the airplane, everything that swims except the submarine. And it’s not just that they eat every kind of animal – they eat every bit of the animal. But in the United States, fish heads are never seen, as if they didn’t exist. The same goes for most hands, paws, claws, hooves and innards. I can remember watching Fear Factor and seeing people on the show getting ill just contemplating eating a 1,000-year-old egg – while my local friends were all asking, “What’s the big deal and where can we get those?”

So as an American, my first few years in Asia were a series of culinary culture shocks. I still remember my first dim-sum lunch here. Naturally one of the dishes was stewed chicken feet. I stared at the steamer, eyes (and mouth) wide open. This is food? People eat chicken feet? What’s wrong with all of the stuff above the feet, where all that nice meat is? “You’re going to have to eat this if you’re going to live here,” I was told. So I picked up a foot and started gnawing on the tiny bones to get at the tiny bit of meat there. “So? How do you like it?” “Um, tastes just like chicken!” “Erm, ah, that’s because it is chicken.” And so two lessons in one meal – chicken feet is a popular dish here and American jokes don’t always go over so well.

Understand that this is a combination of cultural tradition and economic reality. Poor societies scraping for food couldn’t afford to throw away anything. And hundreds of years of refinement
has crafted what some see as cast-offs into what others see as haute cuisine.

Some people come to Asia and run away from this. One guy I used to work with ate lunch every day at McDonalds. Every day. Another co-worker had a wife so afraid of local food she had all her groceries shipped in monthly from the US – even rice and tea!

The problem is that you’re denying yourself some great pleasures if you cannot overcome these prejudices. Where I came from, sushi was a punch line to a joke, not something you’d actually put in your mouth. And now it’s my favourite food in the world. With that lesson learned, I’ve become more open to trying almost whatever is put in front of me. I still can’t go near scrambled eggs but over the years, I’ve eaten barbecued squirrel in Malaysia, raw horse and whale in Japan, fried worms in Thailand and a few things that, well, I’d just rather not know, thank you very much.

My first strange food experience remains my favourite. In 1997, my (now ex-) wife and I travelled to Guilin. As it was our first time in rural China, we were determined not to eat hotel food. We wanted to eat what the locals were eating. The problem was that our guide had told us not to eat at the market. But as we walked around that night looking for dinner, we saw that the market was packed. The people eating there looked just fine, so we ventured inside. We chose a stall that seemed popular, but not so popular we’d need to wait forever for the food.

“What can you make?” we asked. He told us that he was “famous” for his fried noodles, so we went for a plate of that. Choosing the second dish was a bit harder. He had three animal carcasses hanging from his cart. The first was a dog, and my wife didn’t want that. The second was a cat and I didn’t want that. We stared at the third one. We couldn’t figure out what it once was.

Seeing our hesitation, our chef donned a pair of thick rubber gloves, reached under his cart and pulled out a metal bucket. Reaching into the bucket, he removed a honeycomb, pulsing with live bees. He said he could fry it up for us, that it would be really nice. We asked for details. Deep fried with garlic, salt and pepper, some spices. And since it wasn’t dog or cat, we told him to go for it.

Soon he brought the fried noodles to our little folding table. And they were as good as he promised. Then came the second dish. Now it hadn’t actually occurred to me at the time, but when you deep fry a honeycomb, the honeycomb melts away and all you’re left with is bees. And that’s what we got. A huge platter of fried bees. Wings. Legs. Stingers. I stared at this for a minute. My (now ex-) wife looked at me and said, “This is a very poor community. We ordered this food and now we have to eat it. All of it.” (Oddly enough, this is not the reason she’s now my ex-wife.)

So we dug into it. And actually, it wasn’t bad. I tossed my chopsticks aside and picked the bees up by the stingers, using them like toothpicks. I soon realized I had a preference for the baby bees, which were softer and pulpier, while my wife admired the crunchiness of the adults.

As we sat there eating, other tourists came walking by. They would look over at the market and then point at me. I could practically read their lips: “Look, there’s a white person there! It must be all right!” And then they’d say, “Let’s walk over and see what he’s eating!” And then they would walk over, peer at us through the chain link fence and see that we were sitting over a huge plate of bees. And they would all turn around and run back to the Sheraton.

I started to get a little bit worried when a five-year-old girl came over to our table to try to sell us flowers. I offered her some of our bees and she shook her head. I wondered what this little girl might know that I didn’t know. And I started to think, “Oh this is great, I’m going to get violently ill on the first night of a 10-night trip. Is this really such a good idea?”

But we finished the entire plate. And I didn’t get sick. (That came later – the Peking duck at Quanjude in Beijing almost killed me.) Now, I’ll probably never order fried bees again. But for the rest of my life, I’ve got a story to tell.